


And a Lock of Hair

by togina



Series: Howling Commandos [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Hydra Prison, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-11
Updated: 2015-11-11
Packaged: 2018-04-30 09:59:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5159540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/togina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jacques' grand-père had kept a lock of his wife's hair, after she had died. He had worn it around his bony, age-spotted wrist, the way he had worn her smile in the reflection of his eyes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And a Lock of Hair

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on tumblr, [here](http://toli-a.tumblr.com/post/131924508218/well-mamamarvel-coughs-it-is-about-the). References the incipient end of French colonialism in North Africa, but it's hardly Casablanca!

“How did you get to this little corner of paradise, huh, Jackie?” James Montgomery Falsworth asked, huddled in a pile with the rest of their cellmates.  The temperature had dropped days before, and their concrete slice of paradise had frost along the walls.

Jacques snorted and wiped his red nose along Dugan’s sleeve.  Dum Dum growled, but he was still nursing a split lip from Dernier’s defense of France days ago, and knew better than to complain.  Besides, Jacques only had a common cold, and not whatever had gotten into Barnes’s lungs and didn’t want to let go.

As though Jacques had called him, _le sergent_ coughed wetly and gasped for air.  He’d been sick before they’d arrived, Jimmy said, had cracked a rib or four tumbling into a fight that yellow and black troops had been sent to – to win.  Hadn’t breathed right since, though when the others tried to help, Barnes only smiled and said he kept on wheezing so it would feel like home.

Jacques thought New York must be a very unpleasant place, if that were true.

“Yeah, Frenchie,” the sergeant seconded, once he caught his breath.  “Tell us about how you conquered Paris, and all the dames you left behind.”

Jacques hummed, thinking of how to begin.  Falsworth might be _le brigadier_ , the highest ranking officer in their motley camp, but it was Barnes whom they all obeyed.  Something in his pale eyes spoke of survival, of a sniper’s willing patience to beat the odds.  Monty knew power and Dugan knew spectacle, Morita and Gabriel knew how to endure, and Jacques himself knew how to resist.  None of them knew how to wait, and watch—and win.

“I was born by the sea,” Jacques began, because they needed a story that would last.  Two nights before, Dum Dum had talked until his voice gave out, painting lion tamers and tightrope walkers in such vivid colors that no one thought of the ache in their empty guts.

“Of course you were,” Gabriel muttered, in a language Jacques sorely missed.  Out of the six of them in that cell, only Gabriel Jones had been born than a few miles from the sea.  Jacques wondered if it made a difference, if perhaps being born on solid ground would have kept their Sergeant from drowning in his own lungs.

“In my _mémé_ ’s cottage, outside of Marseille.  My father worked for – well, some very important men, and my mother thought it would be better if she stayed with her mother for a few weeks.”

Sergeant raised one eyebrow, exchanged a speaking look with Dugan.  Both men knew enough about cities to hear the things Jacques wasn’t saying.  Dugan had convinced coppers to look the other way, to take the money and leave the rest alone.  James Barnes had worked on the docks, and Marseille was a port like any other in the world, filled with hidden fees and shipments that the inspectors never saw.  Jacques’s father had made a decent living for them, before the war had killed him.

“We used the cottage as a base, after the Germans came,” he went on, because none of their stories truly began before the war.  “It was tucked away, up in the cliffs and out of sight.  You could hear the sea birds crying over their catch, the waves crashing into the rocks.”

“Sounds romantic,” Morita said, dragging out the second word with a lecherous grin Jacques could see even in the dark.  “There’s a broad, I bet.  A really classy one,” he added, smirking, “with enormous … guns.”

Sergeant laughed so hard he choked, and had to roll away from their huddle to hack up part of his lungs.  “Keep talking like that, Fresno,” he coughed out, his voice high and thin, “and the only enormous gun you’ll see will belong to _Tommy_.”

Since he was curled half on top of Dugan, the circus man’s shout of laughter nearly deafened Jacques in one ear.

“There was a woman,” Jacques admitted, because this was part of their evening tradition.  Two weeks ago they’d still had Smithson, and he swore stories about Maud in her nurse’s uniform kept him warm at night.  They didn’t keep him out of Zola’s lab, though, and now the stories of Maud were all the others had left, passed around like a talisman, a headstone for the dead.

“Well?” Falsworth demanded, when Jacques paused for too long.  “You’re French, aren’t you, Jack?  Seduce us!”

“Please don’t,” Gabriel countermanded, wrinkling his nose.  “Don’t get me wrong, Dernier, I like you fine.  You just –” Jones coughed, but kept his face perfectly solemn. “- don’t offer the guns I prefer.  But Fresno might like it.”

Morita shrieked and unearthed himself from Dugan’s mass to leap at Gabriel, and Jacques couldn’t help but chuckle as the two fought.  After Marseille fell—after his _papa_ died from grief, his city raped by Nazis and made their whore—Jacques had thought he’d never be happy again.  It hadn’t been true; and it wasn’t true now, though he’d passed a long summer in Italy before _les commandos_ had arrived.

“She was beautiful,” Jacques continued, once Jones had surrendered and they’d all curled back into a pile of growling stomachs and meager heat.  “Tall, with dark hair that fell to her waist.  She would braid it, wind it about her head, like a crown.”

“What was her name?” Morita demanded, because they had Maud, and Laura, and Victoria, and Lucille, and Maggie, and none of them knew what tomorrow would bring.

“’Mila,” Jacques whispered, and could feel the weight of Gabriel’s frown at the odd name.  “ _Djamila_ ,” he confessed, and three pairs of eyes widened and stared.

“What?” Jim wondered, pulling his cap farther down over his numb ears.  “What’s got your panties in a twist, Sarge?”

“You didn’t serve in Africa, huh, Fresno?” Sergeant replied, a nearly soundless huff of breath.  “Some of the most gorgeous dames in the world.”

“You mean she was –”

“Her father was a captain,” Jacques explained, when Jim seemed unlikely to finish his sentence.  “She wanted to go shopping in a proper French city, so he brought her along.  Someone had directed her to my father, and she was at our house when the Nazis came.”

“She wasn’t shopping for shoes, was she?” Monty said, his voice low.  Startled, Jacques froze and said nothing at all.  Monty huffed, and shook his head.  “I’m not a lieutenant just because I’m dashing in the suit,” he declared.  “I’ve served in Durban.  I have seen young women with saris and smiles charm their way past half the British army, men foolish enough to think these women do not hear about Gandhi’s fierce speeches, or want such freedoms for themselves.  I know what becomes of empire, whether Hitler’s or our own.”

Barnes looked ready to reply, warming to the fight Jacques could see coming (the war had taught him about explosions, after all), but Gabriel interjected before he could.  “Shh,” he hushed the lieutenant, a finger to his lips.  “Jacques was telling us about Djamila.”

So Jacques did.  He talked about the way her hair felt wrapped around his hands, the way she spoke French with an accent so thick it had taken him a month to learn, the Arabic she tried to teach him, the words she whispered in bed.  He talked about fire, in the bombs she taught him to make, in the way that she burned with passion: for him, for democracy, for her cause.  He rubbed at his dry eyes, closed them to better recall the tan lines at her wrists and collarbones, how she would bake almost as dark as Gabriel in the sun.  And the others listened, soaking up Jacques’s story, wrapping Djamila around their necks with their dog tags, with Smithson’s Maud and Jones’s Laura, Falsworth’s Victoria, Morita’s Maggie and Dugan’s Lucille.

When the story ended, Jacques felt weightless, like a sea bird tossed high on a gust of air.  The doctor could come for him tomorrow, he thought as he tumbled into sleep, and it would be all right.  It didn’t matter if Zola took him now, not when the others had enough of him to keep.

But Jacques should have known better, after so much war.  Zola looked right past him—Jacques was too short, too thin despite that they were all skin and bones.  Zola looked right past him, and took Barnes instead.

“He never said,” Jacques fretted, knowing that his worry would do no good, the way Dugan’s attempt to stop the soldiers had only left him stunned on the cell floor.  “He never told us her name.”

“Maybe it means he’s not gone,” Gabriel suggested, the false optimism in his voice fading as they were herded out of the cell and into line.  “Maybe –”  But he fell silent as the soldiers marched down the line.  The soldiers didn’t allow for talking, outside the cramped space of their cells, and the prison didn’t allow for hope.  James Barnes might not yet be dead, but he was already gone.


End file.
